


on either side of a stone door

by simplycarryon



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Prompt Fill, Role Reversal, Spoilers, Underswap AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 02:23:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5230277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplycarryon/pseuds/simplycarryon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That door's always been there. But this is the first time it's ever said "howdy."</p>
            </blockquote>





	on either side of a stone door

**Author's Note:**

> based off popcornpr1nce's [Underswap AU](http://popcornpr1nce.tumblr.com/post/132976461778/i-present-underswap-almost-the-whole-gang-its), which to my understanding is a lot of role reversal and I love it to pieces. this was specifically written to fill a [prompt](http://fuckyeahasgore.tumblr.com/post/133355930911/underswap-scenarios-i-need-drawn-written).
> 
> warning for general entire-game spoilers, as well as two flawed characters dealing with depression, guilt, and existential crises.

The door in the ruins has always been there.

You’ve never seen it open yourself, and you’ve been sentry in Snowdin long enough to know it hasn’t been opened in a long time. Not even the people in town seem to know what’s behind it, aside from “the ruins,” which. Thanks.

But as long as it’s not opening, it makes for a good surface to lean on during your scheduled smoke breaks, and you dig your heels into the snow and lean with all your tired might. Cigarette smoke drifts idly upward, and you breathe in and out and wonder if this is it—if you and your brother are going to be on sentry duty until the end of everything. 

You know better than to hope. There’s an old machine in your garage lab and a stack of notes that keeps piling up that say otherwise, and you have vague memories to corroborate them, memories of dust and darkness, sunlight and sky. 

Vague enough that you’d think they were dreams, if you didn’t keep coming back to them like a bad habit. They tug at your sleeves at the most inopportune moments, sand sifting through your bony fingers as you try to grasp them long enough to make sense of them, and it’s frustrating and pointless at best but you think, you _know_ you’ve done all of this before. You, as an entity in points across the vast multiverse, have experienced this reality again and again enough times that it’s burned into your bones in all of its endless and terrifying possibility.

Kinda sucks, to be honest. Seems like you can’t even enjoy a cigarette these days without delving into your bottomless well of existential despair.

You knock on the door over your shoulder, two knuckles against solid stone. It’s a distraction technique more than anything else; the stone is real and cold and heavy, and touching something real keeps you from remembering your brother in dust, your future as a tattered blue cape.

“Howdy,” the door says, sounding confused.

You choke on your cigarette in your surprise, and you cough roughly instead of saying the words that first come to mind. 

“Can I help you, stranger?” the door asks when you finally manage to get your nonexistent lungs under control.

“Uh,” you say, with all the eloquence of a spider under a spotlight. “No, it’s uh. It’s a knock-knock joke. You’re supposed to ask who’s there.”

“Oh,” says the door, and then, “Who is there?”

You fumble wildly for an answer—“Orange.”

“Orange who?”

 _“Orange_ you gonna let me in?”

The door laughs—a deep, hearty chuckle that makes you think of earth and cozy firelight—and you grin a little bit at the sound of it. “I am sorry, stranger. The ruins are closed to visitors of any kind, unless you happen to be a spider or a ghost.”

“Well, I’m not either of those things,” you say, leaning on the door again, taking another drag of your cigarette now that your shaking hands have calmed down a little. “I’m a sentry. I’m also on break, so I mean, if it’s concerns about work regulations that are keeping your hands tied…”

“If only, my friend,” the voice says. “You must forgive me for my inhospitality. I would invite you in for tea and pie if I could allow you entry at all.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it.” You pat the door, sympathetic to your newfound friend’s plight. “I’m just _chilling_ out here.”

That earns you a snort of laughter, and you allow yourself to feel pleased with this turn of events.

 

 

You fall into a routine, after a while. Your job isn’t at stake when you ditch your station at odd intervals—Alphys never comes through Snowdin if she can help it, because _it’s too damn cold and c’mon what do you want from a cold-blooded creature anyway_ —and besides, you don’t know where a human would come through if not through the ruins.

You wouldn’t mind too terribly if you _did_ get in trouble for it, either. The man behind the door sounds lonely at his best, and you think he lives for the moments you get to swap jokes.

You know you do.

It’s a comfortable companionship, this whole meeting at the door thing. You tell him about your brother, about how proud you are to see him working so hard in everything he does, and in turn your friend tells you about his garden, about the quiet stone halls of the ruins and the way he’s cultivated a bed of the softest flowers in the underground. There’s a hole in the mountain above you, he explains, a hole that humans can fall through, and—it helps, a little, to have something there to cushion the blow at the bottom.

You think there must have been a lot of falls, from the way he talks about them like they are dear people he’s lost, and you ask him about his favorite tea recipes instead.

He’s always happy to elaborate on those, on the blending of herbs and spices and petals and fruit, on how long to steep them and how hot the water should be, and you know more about tea than you’ve ever thought you’d want to know but you enjoy every minute of it.

You try making tea at home, a couple of times, and you relay your horror stories of old ingredients and no proper teapot. He sounds equal parts amused and concerned, and when you tell him you wish you could try his golden flower tea, he sounds—sad.

“I wish you could, as well,” he says quietly.

“Hey, maybe someday,” you reassure him with a half-smile, nudging the door with an elbow. “You won’t have to keep that door closed forever, right?”

“One can only hope.”

You feel your heart sink a little at the loneliness in his voice, and you’re not great at reassuring people who aren’t Sans so you fall back on what you know—“Knock knock.”

“Who is there?”

“I am.”

“I am who?”

“You mean you don’t know who you are?” you ask, and you grin at his laugh, rich and genuine. “But seriously. I’m here. I uh, that probably doesn’t mean much, but I don’t plan on going anywhere as long as me and my bro are stationed here in Snowdin.”

“… Thank you, my friend. That means more to me than you can imagine.”

“Oh, you might be surprised,” you tell him, lighting another cigarette. “I have a pretty good imagination.”

 

 

Your conversations turn to darker things, sometimes.

“I remember my brother dying,” you say, one day, sitting with your back to the door, your knees pulled up to your chest in some small gesture of comfort. “I mean, he’s alive here and now, but I’ve seen him die. I’ve seen _everyone_ die. I’ve seen the entire underground go empty more times than I can count.”

The man on the other side is thoughtfully quiet for a few minutes, and—maybe you’ve been too open, too honest. Maybe trusting him with the weight of this was too much to hope for.

“I am sorry,” he says, his voice a quiet rumble against the door. “Nightmares?”

“No,” you say, and then, “yes? I don’t know. I just know that everything comes to a stop, and—in the end there’s nothing I can do about it. It makes me wonder what the point of anything is. All of this out here—“ you gesture at the snow he can’t see, the trees and the silence and the bars Sans built across the bridge that are too wide to keep anyone out—“none of it means anything.” 

He’s quiet again, for a while, and then—“Do you truly believe that?”

You take a drag on your cigarette and lean against the stone, looking up at the sky.

“No,” you say, softly. “Yes, but also no. I don’t want this to be the end. I don’t want to stop finding meaning in things. It’s just—sometimes getting up in the morning is the hardest thing in the world.”

“I understand,” he says. “And there is nothing wrong with that.”

You turn halfway, enough to give the door a curious glance. “What.”

“Your feelings are as valid as those of anyone else,” he continues. You go back to leaning, and you listen. “I understand that the world must seem like an empty place to you sometimes, and I know there is not much that I could do to alleviate that. But if you ever feel like the weight of it is too much, I implore you to share that burden with me as best you can. I am stronger than you think.”

You open your mouth to reply, and the words catch in your throat.

“Thanks,” you croak, finally. You haven’t cried in so long, but here you are, light blue leaking from your eye sockets. “I, uh. I caught something in my eye, give me a second here.”

“What did you catch?”

“… Tears,” you admit, scrubbing them away with a hoodie sleeve.

“Knock knock,” he says, and you smile a little.

“Who’s there?”

“Boo.”

“Boo who?”

“Do not cry,” he says, and you can _hear_ the warmth in his words, “it is only a joke.”

You snort and imitate the sound of drums and a cymbal strike. “Good one, nyeh heh heh.”

 

 

“I watched my children die,” he says, another time. “I failed to protect them. And then, in my weakness and my grief, I failed to protect those who came after them.”

“I’m sorry,” you say, wishing you had something more to say, but you don’t think he needs that—just the acknowledgement that you’re listening, and that you care. And you can understand that.

“I could have stopped them.” He is silent for a moment. “I could have—I could have done something. Kept them here, kept them from leaving. They might yet be alive, if not for my _damnable_ failings.”

The door shakes, like he’s pounded a fist against it, and you rest a hand on it in response. You wish, not for the first time, that he could open it and let you in. You’d do a lot better face-to-face. But that’s not an option, and you just have to make do.

“You did what you could,” you tell him, quietly. “What you had to.”

“There were others. Humans. They came to the ruins, and they begged me to let them go home.” His voice breaks, and for his sake, you pretend not to notice. “I could only keep them here for so long. It would be a great cruelty to keep a child trapped here forever, even if that were the only way to keep them safe. So: they come. They leave. And they die.”

“That isn’t your fault.” You know the words don’t mean much, but you say them anyway, and you press your hand against the seam of the door, like you could squeeze through it and reach him somehow. “You aren’t responsible for the things other people do.”

“I know,” he says. “And yet—I cannot forgive myself for any of it.”

There’s a burden in your heart on his behalf; sad, maybe, and guilty, and shored up with your own despair. It would be easy enough for both of you to give up, to stop hoping against hope for something better. But he’s helping you carry your troubles, and—even if you don’t like making promises, you figure it’s the least you can do for him in return. 

You take a moment to think about the words you’re about to say, about what exactly they’ll mean in whatever potential future this universe holds, and then you knock twice on the stone door.

“Knock knock.”

“… Who is there?”

“Iva.”

“Iva who?”

“Iva promise to make you,” you finish, leaning your insignificant weight against the door.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It’s not a lot, but… if a human comes through this door, I’ll go ahead and assume you let them pass. And I’ll watch over them, as best I can.”

It’s not much. It’s not even anything, right now, because who knows when the next human is going to come through, but—you think you can hear him exhale, softly, in the quiet of the new snow.

“Thank you,” he says. 

He sounds like he might cry, or like he’s already crying, and you let him be.

 

 

You help carry each other, you and the man behind the door. You think this is what a support group would feel like, if you were willing in any capacity to admit that you needed help. But you’re not, and you don’t, and this is fine.

You like him. You can confide in him, and part of you thinks that’s 100% because of the anonymity that a stone door between the two of you provides, and part of you thinks it’s because he genuinely seems to care about your problems, even if he doesn’t really understand them.

And—you feel a little guilty finding that sort of comfort in someone else. You feel bad weighing him down with your stories of the world coming to such messy and impermanent stops, or with the fact that you are so worn down by it all that you barely want to go on moving, let alone function on any level of taking care of yourself.

But you do, and he accepts you as you are, and offers you what he can through the door. 

You feel, sometimes, like your soul is just a tiny bit lighter.

You talk about happier things, too, always trading jokes as the opportunities strike. He tells you about his family, his life before the ruins. Never in much detail—you think he’s ashamed of who he was, or tired of it, and either way you understand completely and you don’t press him on it—but always with an air of happiness, some old nostalgia he loves to rediscover by telling it back to you. His wife, his children, his home. Warmth and happiness.

You tell him, in turn, about Sans, and about everything Sans does. There’s not much to say about you, so you focus on the happiness in your own life, and that has always been and will always be Sans. You tell the man behind the door about bedtime stories and puzzles, japes and shenanigans, about hot dog cooking lessons and your lives together and how tough and strong and cool your brother is.

Before you realize it, you’re a step closer to happy than you thought you’d ever be again. 

Hope is such a bizarre feeling. You haven’t let yourself feel hope in such a long time, and it sits funny in your chest, like a bird shoved up in your ribcage doing its best to get out.

You’ll remember this, too, across lifetimes, across universes. 

Whatever form this hope takes, you find it here, and you think, maybe, that life could be bearable. The man behind the door is not a guarantee; nothing really is, in this hazy world of starts and stops, beginnings and ends. But he is here, now, and as bad as you are at living in the moment, you take a deep breath and you let yourself live.

**Author's Note:**

> _“Knock knock.”_
> 
> _“Who is there?”_
> 
> _“A door.”_
> 
> _“A door who?”_
> 
> _“I a-door you.”_


End file.
